Food

Compliance & Enforcement

To protect public health, FDA monitors domestic firms and the foods that they produce. FDA also has multiple initiatives for monitoring imported products and foreign firms exporting to the United States. FDA protects consumers from unsafe foods through:

Research and methods development

Inspection

Voluntary Destruction

Sampling

Recall

Seizure

Injunction

Criminal prosecution

This section provides access to FDA's warning and untitled letters, information about inspection and compliance programs, and the Reportable Food Registry.

Untitled letters address violations from manufacturing controls or labeling that do not meet the threshold of regulatory significance for a Warning Letter. Untitled letters can also be issued to websites.

The Reportable Food Registry is an electronic portal for industry to report when there is reasonable probability that an article of food will cause serious adverse health consequences. The Reportable Food Registry helps FDA better protect public health by tracking patterns and targeting inspections.

The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act is based on preventing problems before they happen, rather than solely responding to outbreaks of foodborne illness. But in order to develop prevention-based systems, you need data and other information to help identify hazards that need to be addressed and minimized. Sampling is an important method for gathering data and information.